Making the Most of Slack Encryption to Protect Your Company’s Data

Slack has quickly become one of the leading communications platforms among businesses, allowing employees and teams to bypass email to communicate easily and seamlessly. Sookasa’s Slack integration leverages the platform’s API to provide enhanced security options like DLP, visibility, and enforcement measures to keep company data safe and let team administrators monitor real-time activity. What’s more, Sookasa allows for Slack encryption; team members can share sensitive data through encrypted files and folders directly within Slack. Slack encryption ensures that no internal or external unauthorized users will intercept confidential information.

How does Sookasa’s Slack encryption work?

Slack encryption integrates seamlessly with Sookasa’s encryption solution. Sookasa leverages the APIs of cloud storage providers like Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive to add an additional layer of security to the files you store in them. When you download Sookasa, a new Sookasa folder is created that looks and acts just like a normal folder in your cloud platform. The difference is that any files or folders placed in the Sookasa folder are immediately encrypted at the file level before ever reaching the cloud, and they stay encrypted wherever they’re synced or shared. Only users you authorize are able to decrypt these files, meaning that sending the wrong attachment or misaddressing an email are no longer a threat to exposing sensitive information that’s been encrypted with Sookasa.

For users who are already using Sookasa’s encryption in their cloud storage provider, Slack encryption is seamless. You can share files stored and encrypted in the Sookasa folder across channels in Slack the same way you would attach any other files. The only difference is that only your intended recipients can decrypt those files.

Why is Slack encryption important?

More than a million people use Slack and more than 1.5 billion messages are sent within the app monthly. At many companies, employees subscribe to multiple Slack channels, are privy to chatter about work that may or may not be directly related to their own, and send information to dozens of people. There’s a lot going on in the Slack environment, and as the platform grows, it’s providing more and more options for sharing and attaching files, too. But not all files should be seen by all people at your company. Moreover, if an employee with Slack on her mobile devices loses that mobile device, those files shared in Slack are likely to be exposed.

Despite Slack’s ease-of-use that’s so appealing to users, it’s important to remember that information gets shared there the same way it does anywhere else. And if that information falls into the wrong hands inside or outside of the company, it can result in a data breach, unhappy clients, a federal compliance violation, or a blow to the company’s reputation.

Slack encryption provides a solution that lets files be shared without worrying. A team working on a project with a high-level client can share that client’s financial information on Slack by sending each other encrypted files. By deploying Slack encryption, team members don’t have to worry about other members of the company seeing—and exposing—the sensitive data. Similarly, Slack encryption ensures that a file isn’t sent to the wrong channel by mistake or to the wrong user.

Slack encryption matters because data breaches have become essentially inevitable. File encryption is important on all platforms as a means of keeping sensitive data under wraps, but keeping security top of mind on a new platform like Slack is especially important. Slack is growing quickly and continuing to add new features. Administrators must keep up with the technology and ensure that files and conversations are adhering to security standards.